Let Me Take You Down: Inside the Mind of Mark David Chapman, the Man Who Killed John Lennon

by Jack Jones

privy as all of us are to people like John, there are countless areas of their lives that are known only to them. Their psychological makeup is known only to them. We have examined the John Lennon experience now for how many years? There is a presumption on the part of many that we know everything there is to know about John. But when we arrive at a question like ‘Where did all his anger come from?’—we don’t know. We can draw extrapolations, certain types of conclusions. It’s a question that’s still left hanging. We keep pointing to milestones: John’s mother being run over by an off-duty police officer who was drunk … when he was a teenager. Certainly, a psychologist could point to it as a basis for John’s antiauthority attitude. But it also, upon saying it, sounds like psychological mumbo jumbo. I don’t know. But there were times when the anger came through. You can hear it in his music. When he wrote that song, ‘How Do You Sleep?’ [a slashing musical attack on former Beatle Paul McCartney] you can feel the rage coming through. And when he would drink to excess, he was not the kind of person you would want to be around. When he would be arguing a point that he felt strongly about … he probably was not all that opposed to the use of fists. You wouldn’t want to be around John Lennon when he was angry.”